Top 10 Trickiest Programming Questions for Experienced Developers 🚀

As you grow as a developer, you’re bound to face more complex coding challenges that test your problem-solving skills. These tricky programming questions go beyond the basics and push you to think algorithmically. Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 trickiest programming problems for experienced developers, along with example code snippets to help guide your solutions! 💻🔥

1. Find the Longest Palindromic Substring 🧩

Problem: Given a string, return the longest palindromic substring.

Approach: Use dynamic programming or the “expand around center” technique.

Example Code:

def longest_palindrome(s)
  return s if s.size < 2
  start, max_len = 0, 0
  (0...s.size).each do |i|
    len1 = expand_around_center(s, i, i)
    len2 = expand_around_center(s, i, i + 1)
    len = [len1, len2].max
    if len > max_len
      max_len = len
      start = i - (len - 1) / 2
    end
  end
  s[start, max_len]
end

def expand_around_center(s, left, right)
  while left >= 0 && right < s.size && s[left] == s[right]
    left -= 1
    right += 1
  end
  right - left - 1
end

📘 Explanation: The function expand_around_center checks all possible palindrome centers and returns the longest one.

2. Find Kth Largest Element in an Array 🔢

Problem: Given an unsorted array, find the k-th largest element.